The Republic of Cotton
When they hosted the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, Dallas boosters had good reason to rename their football stadium and associated bowl game based on a bad pun. The "Cotton Bowl" was a nod to the unmatched roll that "King Cotton" had played in shaping the demographics and politics of Texas, where it constituted as much as 90% of the output of the state for parts of the nineteenth century. But it’s a legacy that Texans have become increasingly uncomfortable with in recent decades, increasingly favoring favor the story of the cowboy and cattle drives. There is something far more romantic about a man on a horse than a man with a hoe…particularly when that man with the hoe is enslaved.
Cover art "Young Texas in Repose" available online from Yale University Library.
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